Patrick Dahm – That German-Singapore Lawyer

I don’t like how we use the term guer­rilla tac­tics in inter­na­tion­al arbit­ra­tion. Refer­ring to guer­rilla dis­ap­prov­ingly implies meth­ods of tra­di­tion­al war­fare are alright. Artil­lery or old-school tac­tic­al form­a­tions – okay. Sneaky ambushes or hit-and-run attacks – not okay.

Priy­ageetha Dia has gil­ded Singa­pore with gold foil, again. And a lot of people have called her urb­an art inter­ven­tion illeg­al, again. But what if she and her art had been on sure leg­al ground all along? What if it wasn’t so clear wheth­er remov­ing her golden flags was law­ful or not?

This is my speech at the first Com­pu­ta­tion­al Law & Block­chain Fest­iv­al – Singa­pore Node on 17 March 2018. In it, I tried to explain what ini­tial coin offer­ings are, why gov­ern­ments all over the world eye them curi­ously, and how gov­ern­ments reg­u­late them – if they reg­u­late them. I also ques­tioned why brick and mor­tar gov­ern­ments reg­u­late some­thing so digit­al.

Over lunch the in-house coun­sel of a tech com­pany asked me wheth­er I ever decline work. We were mak­ing small talk, but funny she should ask. Because I have indeed chosen not to work on one or the oth­er ini­tial coin offer­ing or token sale lately.

I do what I do for a liv­ing, so I’m not prone to decline work by default. But these pro­jects didn’t smell right.

It was time for me to go diving again, so I betook myself to Christ­mas Island, this extern­al ter­rit­ory of Aus­tralia in the Indi­an Ocean. Under water I encountered sharks, dol­phins and oth­er creatures of the sea. Above water I went hik­ing, climb­ing and bird­watch­ing in hon­our of the words of someone very dear to me: ‘Take many pic­tures, do many things you don’t get to do in Singa­pore and remem­ber each and every one of them.’

As an object of my fan ador­a­tion. Ah, the enter­tain­ment. You have to love Suits, the TVseries, and the par­al­lel uni­verse it cre­ates. Someone on the inter­net called it shal­low. Well, yeah, it isn’t Dostoyevsky, but who wants to read Rus­si­an lit­er­at­ure all the time!?

Yes, block­chain tech­no­logy can do things which con­ven­tion­al ledgers or registers can­not do. A few days ago I argued that this didn’t mean block­chain should replace tra­di­tion­al ways of record­ing leg­al trans­ac­tions whole­sale. Tra­di­tion­al ways of record­ing leg­al trans­ac­tions embed func­tions which block­chains don’t embed yet. Where the law demands it or wherever else it makes sense we should think about imple­ment­ing them.

For the avoid­ance of doubt, I’m all for catchy ana­lo­gies. They help under­stand much of what’s going on in cyber­space. Even bet­ter than a catchy ana­logy, though, is an ana­logy that’s catchy and apt.

This really very long and quasi-aca­dem­ic post is based on a speech I gave to MBA stu­dents of the Man­age­ment Devel­op­ment Insti­tute of Singa­pore some­time in 2016. Sub­ject: how do we resolve dis­putes and what bor­ders, geo­graph­ic­al or oth­er­wise, do we cross in doing so? Bor­ders and oth­er­wise, ged­dit, I was talk­ing about dis­pute res­ol­u­tion in cyber­space and algorithms.

The space where all data exchange and com­mu­nic­a­tion of the Inter­net hap­pens, cyber­space, is neut­ral. Noth­ing insec­ure adheres to it in and of itself. Insec­ur­ity is brought in by man who pop­u­lates cyber­space, and by the tools that he has brought along. So how to regain secur­ity in this space – cyber­se­cur­ity?

Parties to a leg­al dis­pute may believe they under­stand each other’s legalese or the leg­al ‘etiquette’ applic­able. When really they don’t. This may hap­pen when a party from a civil law jur­is­dic­tion sets foot in a com­mon law envir­on­ment, or vice versa. In inter­na­tion­al arbit­ra­tion pro­ceed­ings, for example.

Appar­ently the High Court of Singa­pore had to decide a case just like this.